Abstract

As the Internet has become critical to the world's social and economic
infrastructure, attention has focused on the correct, safe, reliable, and
secure operation of the Internet infrastructure itself. The DNS is considered
a crucial part of that technical infrastructure. The root domain and its
authoritative name servers are a part of that technical infrastructure.
The primary focus of this document is to provide guidelines for secure, stable,
and resilient authoritative name service for the root zone. Additionally it will
look into some specifics for the operation of the name servers. Other operators
of authoritative name servers such as those for generic top-level domains (gTLDs),
country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and other zones may also find this
document useful.